Because that’s life, baby — Dick Cheney is still in office, and virtue is by no means necessarily triumphant. It is one of the laws of Fairyland, part of its physics, as it were, that reality must be looked dead in the eye. If not, certain doom. In HCA’s “The Shadow,” for example, a gentle and pious scholar is betrayed by his own shadow. Writing his book about “the good, the true, and the beautiful,” training his mind upon the Platonic forms, the scholar is easily outwitted and finally done to death by the suave and bastardly shadow (who also happens to be a great dancer).

“It is,” wrote the Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner in his 1977 book Telling the Truth, “as if the world of the fairy tale impinges on the ordinary world the way the dimension of depth impinges on the two-dimensional surface of a plane, so that there is no point on the plane — a Victorian sitting room or a Kansas farm — that can’t become an entrance to it.” Saunders is a master of these entrances because, to press Buechner’s metaphor a little, he sees through. He’s a pinpoint satirist, yes indeedy, but his real gift is for a sort of angelic irony, hovering warmly in the vertical plane, piercing with forgiveness the veil of things below.

(HCA, too, was hip to the vertical. “From above,” he advised at the end of his tiny story “Heartache,” about the death of the dog Moppsie, “you can always smile at this incident, as well as at many of our own heartaches and those of others.”)

It’s the gentleness of Saunders, his refusal to be shitty or peevish or lowdown, that makes him the single storyteller adequate to the mutant futurism of the Fox News/celeb-reality era. He likes humans, as a rule. Even his sharpest polemics have a wobbly, galactic bemusement about them: “Our venture in Iraq,” he wrote in the title essay of this past year’s collection The Braindead Megaphone, “was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.”

Interlude with rodentsWere you as enchanted as I was, darling reader, by that enchanting movie Enchanted? From the first frame to the last, it was, needless to say, an enchantment. But if, on pain of death, exile, or metamorphosis, I had to pick my favorite scene — well, it would be the one where Princess Giselle (played by the always enchanting Amy Adams) does the housework.

Poor Princess Giselle . . . teleported out of Fairyland by the wicked queen, marooned amid the dog shit and rumbling spires of 21st-century Manhattan, she is homeless, confused, and her white dress is getting dirty. A kindly divorce lawyer lets her sleep in his apartment, but oh!, the place is a mess. She needs some help from her animal friends! Delicately obtruding her tiara’d head from the 25th-floor casement, Giselle trills a few Poppins-notes of song — Ah-ah-ah-ah! — and here they come, not the fauns and fluttering bluebirds of the forest, but the lowlife: the vagrant rats and pigeons, grime-bearers of the metropolis.

Maine storyteller heads away for audiences We here at the Phoenix don't pull this kind of thing often, but this weekend you're missing out. Lewiston native (and Munjoy Hill dweller) Michael Parent has headed 1000 miles southwest from Portland to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, this weekend.

Portland's new wolf pack A poetry collection adapted for the stage has been taken up as the inspiration for a new Portland theater troupe.

Purity Ring | Shrines Ever imagined what it would be like to hear an angel-voiced woman recite a book of fairy tales in the back of a nightclub at 2 am as drowsy synth lines float through the speakers?

God Hates FAQs Editors' note: We selected David S. Bernstein to serve as our resident Rapture expert, on account of his having seen all three Kirk Cameron Left Behind series film adaptations.

Hearts of glass In Ali Shaw’s debut novel, death by glass becomes a star-crossed love story in the vein of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale — a tragedy that strips away its isolated characters’ fears and defenses and reveals their bravery.

Twelve sweet ideas for Maine in 2012 With the new year upon us, we're looking into the future to see what things will be making Maine better in the coming 12 months. Here's a selection of things we'll be watching — and you should, too.

Mirthful morbidity Greenville painter Greg Stones writes that he sketches a basic landscape or figure study, "then I try to think of what would make the painting especially awesome. Penguins, zombies, and nudes are invariably the answer."

GETTING TO KNOW PHILIP LARKIN WITH A NEW EDITION OF HIS POEMS | April 26, 2012 "A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.

BLACK SABBATH ARE BACK — IN PRINT AND ON FILM | November 14, 2011 The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.